One of the most entertaining rants I've read in some years! And whilst it may no longer be that pertinent to my current career, having been the person in charge of developing a nested, tangled mess of VBA macros and Excel sheets to partially-automate several workflows, I can also deeply sympathise 😂

On the issue of "but we're only doing this for now":

Do you know how many times I've written a script that was really only run once? Never. It has never happened across my entire career. Every single thing I've ever written has been fucking welded into the soul of every organisation I've ever worked at.

On what happens once you've opened the door to Excel:

Beyond this lies naught but trying to work out why all the numbers are wrong, only to realize that Excel thought those IDs were integers and dropped all the leading zeroes.

I've seen a multi-million dollar analytics platform that is dynamically constructed from Excel spreadsheets. Do you think that was the intention when the damn thing was being assembled? Do you think any sane person would ever want to do that? No, of course not. One script got written that could parse a spreadsheet, and next thing you know, you're running a greedy search algorithm every sprint, and it never quite makes sense to spend the time removing them.